BP, government failed to exchange crucial spill data

Updated 12:34 am, Wednesday, November 14, 2012

BP and the U.S. government portrayed in public a united front as a runaway well spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

But privately they sought to withhold potentially critical information from each other, possibly slowing efforts to solve the crisis, according to new testimony.

Last month's closed-door testimony by Marcia McNutt, head of the U.S. Geological Survey, could complicate a Justice Department probe that has focused on whether BP and its partners obstructed justice by lying to investigators.

“It could have impeded the investigation and both sides may share some blame in that regard,” said Blaine LeCesne, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who has followed the case.

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Motivations aren't clear from transcripts the Houston Chronicle obtained of McNutt's two-day deposition in New Orleans, but the British oil giant's pocketbook and the government's ability to punish the responsible parties remain on the line more than two years later.

To date, only a low-level former BP engineer has been charged with a crime, accused of deleting text messages exchanged after the disaster.

The government has yet to assess billions of dollars in expected fines and penalties for the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

“I didn't feel a partnership, you know, ‘Let's figure out how we're going to solve the flow rate problem. Let's sit down and put the best minds from BP and the best minds of government and work this out,'” testified McNutt, who headed a government team tasked with determining how much oil was spilling from BP's Macondo well. “There was this tenseness. It was almost kind of a chill in the room when flow rate issues came up.”

Knowing how fast the oil was flowing was a key to evaluating possible ways to stop it.

The transcript shows the tight-fitting capping stack that ultimately closed the well was available long before BP used it, but the company first went through a series of other fixes that failed.

Oil flowed for almost three months, totaling nearly 5 million barrels by government estimates — an average daily flow of more than 57,000 barrels.

“Were you aware when you began working on the Macondo well in May (2010) that the capping stack was ready to go and was ready to be installed?” a lawyer asked McNutt, according to the deposition transcript.

“I was not aware,” she responded.

“Would that be the type of information that the government would have wanted to know?” the lawyer asked.

“All information is good information,” McNutt responded.

Since BP's undersea well blew out in the Gulf off Louisiana and the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, killing 11 workers, several disclosures have suggested that some BP officials knew early on that more oil was spilling than the company was acknowledging publicly.

McNutt's testimony, and documents presented during her deposition, depict a greater internal struggle and indicate that BP engineers and outside contractors warned BP executives that they may have been grossly underestimating the rate.